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Monday, December 06, 2010

Tail Wagging The Dog Story

This is a tail wagging the dog story if ever I saw one. Who do on air news teleprompter readers go to when they have an ax to grind? Why Media Matters of course.

Ex-CNN anchor Leon Harris, who’s working these days as an anchor at WJLA-TV in Washington, D.C., says a reporter fired from his station and just-hired by Fox News may have intended to lose his local gig so he could land at Fox.

Harris tells Media Matters reporter Doug McKelway seemed to shed his professionalism in favor of seeking out a “YouTube moment” that might hasten a high-profile firing.

Really? Their outlet of choice for gossip is Media Matters? We all know, or at least should know what a straight arrow that George Soros funded group over there is. The normal flow is leak it to Media Matters, or rely on them to fabricate a story out of fairy dust, disseminate it further through the Huffington Post which gets it into the Yahoo news feed and then into the New York Times and finally onto MSNBC's breathless story of the day. Trace any of your favorite anti Fox, Palin bashing or Republican supposed dirty tricks stories and you will discover this is the normal trail. Sometimes it works in the reverse direction, but they have all of their online, print and mass market media covered and all singing the same tune so that the public are constantly hearing about so many non story stories, but they must be true cause I saw, read, or heard it here.

Anyway the story sounds like a lot of sour grapes from the folks no doubt facing their own uncertain future over at WJLA and more then a little bit strange that all their stories have the same key points.

Last week, several WJLA staffers offered criticisms of McKelway to Media Matters.

Only Harris is quoted but the piece is written to give the impression that the other employees said the same things.

As heady as the stories were, Harris began to grow restless as another American war loomed in the Middle East in 2002. Now an established anchor, Harris had been getting job feelers from stations around the country, including WJLA. He demurred, hoping that CNN would give him a choice reporting assignment during the coming conflict in Iraq. "It was a classic all-hands-on-deck situation, and I wanted to be one of the hands," Harris said. "I needed to know I wouldn't be doing cut-ins."

Except that's exactly what CNN had in mind. As the war started, Harris became the cut-in king, popping up for hours on end with one-minute progress reports. He began to keep count: At one point, he did cut-ins for 34 consecutive days.

Harris called his agent.

"It was clear to me that they didn't think I was as good as I thought I could be," he says. "I got frustrated. I just wanted to feel like a grown-up. The way I came up, maybe they didn't think I could be a real journalist. I think they thought I was a good guy, a team player, but I wasn't a real news grown-up. ... If I didn't leave, I knew I wouldn't feel like a grown-up."

Oh, you wanted to be treated like a grown up as opposed to Mr McKelway who is going the other way on the news business food chain. You had your chance. You felt that CNN was screwing you over and you moved on but you want to criticize somebody else who may feel the same way?